Áperi, San Miguel: A Beet Salad to Cry For
But the beet salad at Áperi in San Miguel de Allende is something else entirely. The plate arrives looking almost too pretty to disturb.
I love beet salad.
I love it roasted, pickled, warm, cold, with goat cheese, with walnuts, with citrus, with herbs, or simply dressed with a little good olive oil and salt. So perhaps I am an easy mark.
But the beet salad at Áperi in San Miguel de Allende is something else entirely.
The plate arrives looking almost too pretty to disturb. It is a kaleidoscope of color and floral touches. There are beets in different colors, each with its own texture and intensity, along with little pieces of dried beet and tiny pools of purée, jam and gel scattered across the plate. Edible flowers of all colors. There are creamy dollops of horseradish-whipped goat cheese.
And then there is the nasturtium leaf.
It is the smallest detail, but it is the thing I can't stop thinking about.
The leaf is dotted with tiny drops of white vinegar, carefully placed so they look like dew drops.
It is a thing of beauty.
Apparently, Áperi has been featuring the humble beet for a very long time.
When Matteo Salas was at the helm of Áperi, an earlier version of the restaurant's beet salad appeared with small pickled beets, caramelized pecans, sweet beet foam and horseradish cream. Even then, the dish was being built around the same basic idea: take the earthy sweetness of the beet and push it in different directions with acidity, sweetness, texture and the sharpness of horseradish.
The current salad feels like that idea has been taken apart and rebuilt.
The beet is no longer just one thing on the plate. It is pickled, dried, puréed, gelled and layered with other preparations. The goat cheese brings richness, but then the horseradish cuts through it. The vinegar adds another little jolt of acidity.
When Áperi opened at Dos Casas in 2014, Matteo Salas quickly established a style of cooking that was contemporary, technically ambitious and deeply interested in the ingredient itself. Contemporary techniques were there, but the idea was not to bury the product beneath them. One early critic described Salas's cooking as food that “ennobles the product” and dresses it with only what is necessary.
That philosophy seems particularly fitting when the ingredient is a beet.
A beet is humble. It is inexpensive. It is something most of us have encountered a thousand times. But give it to a chef who is willing to really explore it and suddenly you have a plate with half a dozen expressions of the same vegetable.
And the beet has survived the changing chapters of Áperi.
Salas eventually left the restaurant, and Olivier Deboise took over the kitchen in 2018, with the stated intention of preserving the philosophy that Salas had established while bringing his own ideas to it.
Today the kitchen is led by Jesús Vázquez Reyna, who began working at Áperi in 2015, when he was just 17. He rose from cook to chef de cuisine before leaving to work in other high-level kitchens and eventually returning to Áperi in 2023.
The beet salad isn't simply a beautiful new dish. It is a conversation across Áperi's history and its chefs.
And if you're looking for a full meal, don't stop with the beets.
The octopus is excellent, and I particularly love the duck with black mole. The mole comes almost as a smear, intensely concentrated and dark, with little bits of crystallized umami running through it. It is the sort of sauce you want to drag every last bit of duck through.
You can order one of Áperi's full tasting menus, including the current five-course tasting menu, or go all the way with the Chef's Table. But we almost never do that.
We make our own tasting menu.
And that's another thing I like about Áperi: it never seems packed when we go.
The restaurant is tucked into the lovely courtyard of Dos Casas, a small boutique hotel on Quebrada. The courtyard gives the restaurant an intimate, almost hidden feeling, and the hotel itself has just 11 individually designed rooms. It feels more like stumbling upon a beautiful private house with an extraordinary restaurant inside than walking into a big destination hotel.
